The WAL

As of eight pm tonight, I’m on vacation, not returning to work until July 8th.  If the Toronto Zoo had a theme song, I’d be humming it now, but I’m humming the Marineland theme song instead.  It’s our second destination, after the Zoo.  From there some other touristy stuff in Niagara Falls and perhaps across the border and home late Friday night or maybe even Saturday if we decide we can squeeze an extra day out of the budget.

I know it’s been several days since I posted, but my spare time has been sucked dry tidying things up for holidays and even my writing is hitting bare minimum word counts.  I will also not be doing any significant writing for the five days I’ll for sure be away but hitting things fairly heavy after I’m back so the overall word count on “Skip to my Luu” won’t be much different than it would have been.  I am taking a pair of 25k word novellas to possibly read if I have time.  No real intentions of editing, but we’ll see how things go.  Maybe in the van when it’s not my turn to drive.

Long post the day after we get back.  Promise.

Needs to be taken off your list, dammit!

People calling me trying to sell me something or tell me I’ve won something is bad enough.  Computers doing it irritates the hell out of me.  There’s no satisfaction in saying, “No thank you,” to a machine and hanging up on it.  There isn’t that much going it to a human being either because the poor sod on the other end is just doing their job, although I’d suggest they might try to find another and stop interrupting my dinner.  But having a computer do the dialing, <sigh>.

I can picture the reasoning: efficiency.  More people annoyed per hour.  I expect phone soliciting has a very low success rate, but if you can call more people per hour, and I’ll bet a decent computer can even call several people at once, that low success rate translates into more sales which you can patch through to one of your far fewer live operators.  Voila!  More profit.

More general societal stress, too.  It’s not like you can call the computer back while it’s having dinner, but that’s when most people are home to answer the phone, right?  It’s like audio spam, but the only filter is to screen your calls.  real spam, you can just delete, and junk mail can be sent along to other companies who are dumb enough to include postage paid envelopes with their junk mail.

Yes, I do that.  It doesn’t take much time or effort and it amuses me to think of the entertainment the people in their mail rooms get when they recieve their own envelopes back stuffed as full as I can make them with other people’s junk mail.  Who knows, maybe they find something they need once in a while.

But I’m not ever going to buy something over the phone and what makes any marketing genius think that people will believe a recorded voice telling them that they’ve won a trip to Hawaii?  Idiots.  Let me eat my food while it’s still luke warm without having to explain to my kids every single time that it’s just another computer and let the machine get it.

Further to yesterday, and yes I know driving is a running theme with me, probably because I do so much of it, I thought I’d share a poem I wrote several years ago when I was still commuting to and from Mississauga twice per week.  If this is your license plate number, then I’m sorry but you were being an idiot and almost caused several accidents in less than a minute.

AFMR 816

Yes, I mean you, you stupid tool
Find your way to a driving school
Silver Chevy Optra LS
You never learned to drive, I guess
I’ve seen you do some stupid things
Like you’re looking for some angel’s wings
The book is filled with rules, it’s true
But I guess those don’t apply to you
I hope that when you crash your ass
There’s no one else to smell the gas
But if I thought that, then I’d be dumb
There’s millions more where you came from

Something on a different subject tomorrow.  I promise.  Four out of the last six posts, counting this one, have had something to do with my car.  And I love my car, by the way.  Honda Fit, but we’re not going to have that discussion today.

The price of gas sucks. Yes, I recognize that Europe has been paying theh equivalent of $2 per litre of gas for some years now and I certainly sympathize. However, I don’t live in Europe, the oil companies are raking in record profits raping us at the pumps, and the only reasons that oil is so high right now are fear, speculation, and George W. Bush.

But this is not a rant about oil and gas. This is a rant about driving etiquette, but fuel consumption enteres into it.

Because gas is in excess of $1.25 per litre most days ($1.306 on my way to work this afternoon), I’ve modified my driving habits with increasing my fuel efficiency in mind, mostly in the area of speed (and expanding my use of cruise control, but that’s a different discussion). I more or less drive the speed limit on the highway most of the time. Really. The difference between cruising at 120 and cruising at 100 is about 25% more mileage in my car, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less depending on road conditions and weather. This is a good thing, considering the previously mentioned price of fuel. And any extra fuel I don’t burn is extra CO2 and other crap I don’t pump into the air to make the planet hotter.

I do recognize that not everyone is slowing down. I can’t force anyone else to slow down. What I can do is set a good example and explain my actions and reasoning when asked or when it comes up in conversation. And there are also some things I can’t do for people who haven’t yet decided to slow down and who are dicks about it.

1. Speed up and change lanes so that you can pass me sooner.
2. Slow down and change lanes so that you can pass me sooner.
3. Wait for you to get around to passing me while I run up the tailpipe of the car in front of mine.

The first two are bad for my fuel efficiency and the third is just dangerous. All three also assume that I believe your schedule or destination is more important than mine. If you’ll think about that for a moment, I’m sure you’ll see why I’m not willing to burn the extra fuel to make you happy.

Oh, and just in case it’s unclear, by ‘you’ I don’t mean you. I mean the idiot behind me flashing his or her highbeams in my rearview because they think it will do something other than piss me off. Unless that idiot happens to be you.  And then I do mean you.

I learned a new word recently while listening to one of the political affairs shows that populate a large chunk of my mp3 player.  Learning a new word isn’t all that unusual for anyone - there are something around half a million words in the English language and more being invented or borrowed from other languages all the time - but this one stood out for me.

There is apparently some concern that Afghanistan might actually attempt to defend itself against violent extremist elements sheltering across the border in Pakistan by pursuing them back across the border after raids in order to exterminate them.  This drives the further concern that related elements in current, not terribly stable, Pakistani coalition government could somehow manage to talibanize the government or nation of Pakistan.

That’s the word: talibanize.  Certainly a made up word if I’ve ever heard one, but I automatically knew what it meant.  So by extension, there must be an infinitive: to talibanize.  And if it’s going on right now, the government would be talibanizing.  Last week it, would have talibanized.  We’re worried about the talibanization of the Pakistan government.

Crazy language, isn’t it?  And Afghanistan is certainly a crazy place, not to mention dangerous.

But the whole verbification phenomenom, while not new, certainly seems to be accelerating.  Monetize.  Tase.  I googled myself today.  Pixelate.  Verbify.  Nouns and adjectives made into verbs are everywhere.  It’s not new.  It’s not original.  It’s one of the ways the language grows.  But it is sometimes bizarre.  Talibanize strikes me as bizarre.

When I come out of a store to find something yellow stuck under my windshield wiper, I expect it to be a parking ticket. Not that I want a parking ticket, and I certainly don’t expect one in a parking lot, but it’s what society has trained me to expect. Parking tickets irritate me, but what I found yesterday coming out of a large store was far worse.

I knew before I got to my car that it wasn’t a ticket because everyone’s car had one. You’d have to be really busy and really bored to ticket several hundred people at once. On retrieval, I found it was a coupon for the Subway that just opened across the parking lot. This is wrong on so many levels. Aside from wasting people’s time and irritating them in general, it’s a horrible waste of treeflesh. How many pieces of that yellow paper wound up on the ground, or worse yet in a garbage can? And you paid someone to irritate a parking lot full of people. How is this good for your brand new business?

Am I overreacting? I can’t be the only one who thinks this is more obnoxious than junk mail. I thought this kind of advertising disappeared in the seventies. Obviously, someone didn’t get the memo.  At least it wasn’t for a telephone psychic.

My youngest has developed a passion for Crazy 8s. I’m not exactly sure where it came from, but sometime in the last little while a children’s version of the game (special deck featuring bugs and using a smaller number of cards and slightly more limited rules than a standard deck) and for the last week or so, she always wants to play, asking me almost as soon as I come downstairs if I’ll play it with her after I finish breakfast. I haven’t yet said no, but I try to get her to let me blink the sleep out of my eyes first. She’s very hard to resist, but that’s the way things work and I don’t mind all that much.

Skip to My Luu Progress
29,330 / 70,000
(41.9%)

5,119 words in the last four days, my long weekend. A far cry from Nathan Lowell counts, but not too bad for me. And technically I did put in more than 2200 words on a couple of other things as well. yes, if I could focus completely on one thing, I’d make faster progress. If every word I’d written this month had been on “Skip to My Luu”, I’d be about 7,100 words farther, but I have a hard time working that way, needing the mental change of gears to stay fresh.

And yes, I realize it only took me a week to miss my first daily post.  How long will it take me to miss the next one?

So what bothers me about gas prices isn’t so much the assume collusion between the major oil companies to set prices.  There are only a few of them and society has allowed that, so they can more or less do what they want.  Irritating, but less offensive than how the continually smack us all in the face with it.  Gas goes up for the weekend or holiday nad comes down after it’s over.  Summer is more expensive than winter.  Oil companies profits keep hitting new reocrd highs.  Charges in Québec last week and further investigations in other jurisdictions notwithstanding, there are things I just don’t understand.

How you can justify raising the price of gasoline cracked from crude weeks ago based on the price of oil going up today.  It doesn’t seem to work the other way around.  Prices take a lot longer to fall when oil comes back down.  This is called price gouging.  Really.

How you can justify raising the price of gasoline in your tanks purchased from the supplier at a lower price.  This doesn’t seem to work the other way around, either.  Wouldn’t it be smarter to keep the lower price as long as possible?  People would flock to your stations.

Why Wednesday is usually the cheapest day of the week to buy gas.  Furthest day away from a weekend in either direction, maybe, or are you training me to think this way the same way you’re trying to train me to think of $1 per litre as cheap?

Why everyone’s prices are all more or less the same.  Competition isn’t supposed to mean identical.

Why the volume is corrected to 15 degrees Celsius.  This might make sense somewhere the average annual temperature is actually 15 degrees.  Somewhere far to the south of where I live, perhaps that’s the case.  For the vast majority of Canada, and those parts of the US that actually experience winter, reality is something much lower.  In fairness, the global average temperature is currently about 14 degrees, so maybe that’s where it comes from, but for south-eastern Ontario, the real average seems to be between 6.5 and 7 degrees by the data I can find.  Never mind that the vast majority of pumps may or may not be calibrated correctly.

Why ‘Refining and Marketing’ costs are lumped together in those little pie charts eveyrone puts on the pumps.  I don’t think they have an awful lot to do with each other, and considering how much gas is sold in this country, I have a hard time believing the marketing budget could be very large, especially in light of how much advertising and marketing actually goes on.  I wonder if this is just a secret code for “hidden profit”.

I guess my real point is this, if you’re telling me to bend over, don’t pretend you’re not.  A little lubricant would be nice.

On a day when nothing earth shattering happened in my life and no one did anything to really irritate me, what do I blog about?  Well, how about the fact that I’m on a four day weekend, sort of.  I’ve given up trying to understand the supposedly rotating schedule I’m on at work.  The four weeks on days, four weeks on nights part doesn’t even seem to work properly, and it’s hard to guess what my days off are going to be in the next cycle.  Right now, I’m on my way back to Eastern Daylight time and while I don’t work until Wednesday, my wife starts her new job on Monday so I’ve got just a little more than exactly forty-eight hours to adjust back to something resembling a regular sleep schedule.  I should go to tbed.  Problem is, I’m not really all that tired yet.

Skip to My Luu Progress
24,211 / 70,000
(34.6%)

But with four days off in a row, I should make some great writing progress, even mucking with my sleep schedule.  Shooting for 1000 words per day on Skip to My Luu for those four days which might put me near the end of chapter ten of an estimated eighteen.  And yes, that’s only a recipe for 56k words or so, but several of the back nine chapters are longer, so we’ll see where we wind up.

That’s the title of my current favourite podcast.  I’m trying to remember if I’ve mentioned it before and if not, shame on me.  It’s an audio podcast of the novel of the same name by Philippa Balantine, world famous (or she should be) New Zealand author.  Every Monday (although Pip is usually early), we get the next chapter and we’re about half way through the book right now.  All the major parts are voiced by different people and the production qualities are spectacular.  Did I mention that it’s a fantastic story?  No?  It moves to the front of the MP3 listening queue regardless of what else is on the player.  The caption is ‘Follow Shakespeare into the world of the fey.’  What other hook do you need?  Chasingthebard.com.  Go listen.  Trust me.